Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Most of the articles below were discussed on other sites such as the All Energy Forum, Know Nukes, and the Obama 2008 Campaign website. So below are the top ten most controversial articles posted on New Papyrus in 2008.

Sunday, December 28, 2008

There were many interesting and important blog articles posted on the world wide web in 2008 . So here at New Papyrus, I'm starting an annual tradition (between Christmas and New Years) of naming the top ten blog articles of 2008 posted at other blog sites.

Additionally, on New Years Eve, I will also list the top ten blogs posted here on New Papyrus in 2008.

So if you happened to miss these previously posted articles, here's your chance to discover some of the most interesting blogs of the year.

Friday, December 26, 2008

This 2006 Liberty article by Randal O'Toole is absolutely fascinating! Its a must read if you ever wondered why housing prices in the US ever got so high and so out of reach for the average American citizen, and why housing inflation is related to the current economic collapse of the world economies :

For decades, planners have worked at raising the price of housing. When prices go down, they may take the rest of the economy with them.

Housing prices have soared in most of the developed world over the past five years. Increased spending on homes and spending out of loans against the increased equity in homes have kept the world economy afloat despite slow growth in Europe, stagnation in Japan, and the dot-com and telecommunications crashes in the United States.

But the increased prices have also brought speculators into housing markets, creating numerous housing bubbles. When these bubbles deflate, it could result in a deep recession. "The whole world economy is at risk," claims The Economist, which estimates that "two-thirds (by economic weight) of the world . . . has a potential housing bubble." "It is not going to be pretty," concludes the magazine.....

Friday, December 5, 2008

During the Great Depression, the Roosevelt administration decided to create jobs in the US by expanding electric power into some of the rural areas of America by federally financing the construction of dams for hydroelectric power production through federal agencies and public power corporations such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, and the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers. Huge hydroelectric power producing dams such as the Hoover Dam and the Grand Coulee are still part of the lasting legacy of federal public power investment during the Great Depression. Today there are 9 Federally owned utilities in America and there are over 2000 public power (municipal, state, and intrastate) utilities in the US.

In a previous post, Public Power & the Future of Nuclear Energy, I argued that the fact that nuclear facilities in the US rely too much on private capital is one of the biggest obstacles to nuclear power expansion in America. If the new Obama administration along with the new US legislature are serious about stopping global warming while also achieving energy independence without collapsing the economy, then the federal government needs to seriously consider the federal funding of nuclear power in this country by creating a Federal Nuplex Corporation (FNC).

I envision the FNC as a public power corporation somewhat similar to the TVA Federal public power corporation which funds and operates hydroelectric, coal, and nuclear power facilities.

As I envision it, the FNC will:

1. Provide minority capital investment (up to 45%) for the construction of new nuclear power plants for states and regional utilities, preferably on existing nuclear sites. There is enough room on existing nuclear sites to at least triple our current nuclear capacity.

2. Generation IV nuclear breeding technologies (uranium and thorium fast reactors and ADS accelerator reactors) with the goal of full scale demonstration projects by the year 2020 and full scale commercialization by the year 2030. Such breeding technologies would allow the US to power itself and the rest of the world essentially forever with fertile uranium 238 and thorium 232.

Federal Nuplexes would sell baseload electricity to local utilities. Nuplexes will also produce methanol and oxygen which will be used to fuel off-site methanol power plants which will be located up to 80 kilometers way from the nuplex facility. Such high efficiency methanol-oxygen power plants will be able to produce peak-load and back-up load energy. The carbon dioxide produced at the facility could be captured and recycled, piped back to the nupex in order to make more methanol.

Federal Nuplexes would be utilized to produce and sell carbon neutral transportation fuels such as gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel, dimethyl ether and industrial chemicals such as methanol, hydrogen, and ammonia. While it may be 5 to 10 years before carbon dioxide from air extraction technologies would be commercially available for hydrocarbon fuel production, waste carbon dioxide from urban and rural biowaste power plants could serve as an alternative source of CO2. This symbiotic relationship between nuclear power and biowaste power could provide up to 30% of the current transportation fuel needs in the US.

The Federal government should at least initially provide the FNC with 10 to 15 billion dollars annually for seed money (about what the US spends in about a month in Iraq). Additional FNC funding should eventually come from revenues generated from FNC minority capital investments in nuclear power facilities from non-federally owned utilities and from the sale of electricity and synfuels from Federal nuplexes. This would mean that even if tax payer funds were eventually cut off to the FNC, new reactors construction would continue to be funded by revenues coming in to the FNC.

I should note that I am also in favor of a similar Federal investiment in a Renewable Energy Corporation that would invest 10 to 15 billion dollars of Federal funds annually in small hydroelectric, biowaste energy, wind, and solar projects which I shall discuss in more detail in a future post. 30 billion in annual nuclear and renewable investment over the next 20 or 30 years is really not to much to ask if we're really serious about energy independence and solving the problem of global warming. And that's less than ten percent of the annual US military budget and almost twice as much as we annually spend on NASA. The primary goal of the Federal Nuplex Corporation and an American Renewable Energy Corporation would be to continuously build more and more nuclear reactors and renewable energy facilites until the US is completely free of carbon dioxide pollutiong technologies within the next 25 to 30 years.The famous Chicago born nuclear physicist, Alvin Weinberg, was an early proponent of nuclear parks and an existing site policy and pointed out the remarkable fact that if current commercial in the US nuclear reactors receive normal maintenance, they will never wear out. The 50th nuclear reactor (the Wolf Creek nuclear power plant in Kansas) has recently received a license renewal for an additional 20 years with the remaining 54 active nuclear reactors expected to do the same in the near future. That would mean that future generations in the US could inherit hundreds or even thousands of still active nuclear reactors, with each individual reactor pulling in millions of dollars of revenue on a daily basis for at least a human lifetime-- if not longer-- along with energy independence and an energy economy that no threatens the global environment.

If the Federal government is going to spend big money in the near future on massive infrastructure projects, I can't think of one that would be more economically and environmentally beneficial for both in the short run and in the long run than investing in a technology that the US Federal government first invented towards the end of the Great Depression that could power our planet with clean energy-- forever!

"The knowledge that we have now is but a fraction of the knowledge we must get, whether for peaceful use or for national defense. We must depend on intensive research to acquire the further knowledge we need ... These are truths that every scientist knows. They are truths that the American people need to understand." (Harry S. Truman 1948).